


Lost and Found

by AndreaLyn



Category: Tin Man (2007)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-12
Updated: 2014-07-12
Packaged: 2018-02-08 13:11:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,929
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1942422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndreaLyn/pseuds/AndreaLyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they put Ambrose's brain back in, he wasn't supposed to keep glitching and certainly not for days at a time. It's been three-plus days and Ambrose has strange coordinates on his hand and he's lost, waiting to be found.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Lost and Found

The world being strange and new shouldn’t have been so familiar to Ambrose, but in truth, he was beginning to become accustomed to not knowing where he was or who he was with or even why he was there. The worst part was that this was  _with_ a brain. The medics had looked at him with disdain and disbelief (he remembered that,  _unfortunately_ ) when he’d asked why it wasn’t doing better, saying only that healing was not immediate and magic did not fix all.   
  
This was probably why Ambrose found himself sitting up in a lush, green field of trees he couldn’t name to the sound of several birds chirping on the horizon, the Black Mountains looming darkly as the suns set down into them.   
  
“Uh…” was about all he got out before the sheer unfamiliarity of the place struck him mute and he picked himself up in the middle of nowhere and tried to locate footprints (none and the wetness of the ground meant they’d been washed away).   
  
He didn’t even know how many days he’d been unconscious this time. All he knew was that his hand bore the marks of ink and there were three markings there. One was four in vertical lines. One was five. And one was a location that made absolutely no sense: C. Due W51.6N88.9’   
  
It might have made sense except he was fairly sure that the Black Mountains were in the East. Or were they? Or was he looking at the Spire Mountains that ranged from the West down to the South? Ambrose ran a hand through his disheveled hair and wished he had a compass or maybe Wyatt Cain and his seeming ability to tell what direction was which.  
  
Cain. Wait. That prompted something, something in the back of his mind but… _no_. It’d been there and then it was gone and he couldn’t put his finger on it. He sighed as he got to his feet and gave an audible whine when his boots sloshed and his coat dripped water and he had dirt just about on every visible inch of his body.  
  
He was a mess and he was lost.   
  
“Hey there!” a loud shout caught him off guard and he stumbled and started like a fawn caught traipsing in the words. He turned slowly to find a shotgun being pointed in his direction by a grizzled and grey old man, standing at the cliffs amidst all those strange trees that Ambrose couldn’t name. “Come on over, before you catch your death.”  
  
Behind him stood a woman with hair that had probably once shone as beautifully golden as fields of grain and hay but now was a dulled grey, hand on her hip to push back a duster that revealed a waiting gun that she had yet to lay a finger on.  
  
Ambrose probably should have run.   
  
Instead, his weariness, his wetness, and his confusion as to why he was in the middle of a forest near some mountain-range drove him to pick up his soggy feet and join the elderly couple at the top of the embankment, peering down at the valley he’d been asleep in. “Do you know me?” he couldn’t help asking.  
  
“Just know an idiot when I see one,” the man said in return, tone pointed as he looked him up and down and harrumphed, shaking his head. “Catch your death, you will, going around in that state. Especially the way it gets here at nights.” He cocked the gun and flicked off the safety, not waiting for either Ambrose or the woman as he started his descent down towards a sprawling house in the distance, the sound of a waterfall beckoning them closer.  
  
The woman rested her palm on Ambrose’s back and looked up at him with sympathy in her blue eyes. “Don’t mind him,” she said under her breath, a confidential whisper. She was wearing layer upon layer of beiges and greens and tugged a wool sweater tight under her beige trenchcoat. “He hasn’t eaten yet today and he’s a mite cranky.”  
  
Ambrose managed a shaky smile, wrapping his arms around his wet torso as he followed along in the previously-established path and tried not to shiver too badly as night came on quickly and, just as promised, was cold as the bite of the Northern regions of the O.Z. With one last glance over his shoulder (the wind chilly against his back), Ambrose rethought his position. Those had to be the Spire Mountains, which put him right in the old country, where the Resistance had sent most of their most valuable members along with the citizens of the O.Z. who weren’t able to keep up the fight any longer. Shrouded by the wall of the Mountains, Azkadellia had long ignored the people as they were useless without magic, resources, and didn’t dare to threaten her reign. They were merely Resistance outposts to heal the wounded, to let the tired and the old convalesce. Ambrose had somehow found his way into one of those outposts and he was about to sit down to dinner with them.   
  
“I’m Harry,” the man introduced over the burning candles that lit up the dinner table. It was hours after Ambrose had been brought to one of the  _many_  bathrooms and made to bathe, relax, and dry off that he had been summoned by a young maid for dinner. “And this is my wife, Susan.”  
  
“Call me Sue,” she insisted as they were served a hearty course of soup by that same pretty young maid that had summoned Ambrose earlier. “We noticed you around midday, thought you were dead t’il we saw you were still breathing. Not many a man winds up sleeping near the Spires, these days. What’re you doing out here?”  
  
“I don’t really know,” Ambrose admitted, staring at the silver spoon in his fingers as he watched it spin back and forth, illuminated by the candles. He fumbled with it slightly, extending his palm to her – and he’d made  _sure_  he hadn’t washed the ink off. “I had these coordinates on my hand, but I have issues with memory. I lose days at a time, but I had this address, these…” He trailed off when he caught Harry exchanging a long glance with Sue. “What?” he asked flatly, voice full of wariness.  
  
“It’s our house, kid,” Harry answered, his gaze filled with suspicion. “Why is it you’ve got our address on you?”  
  
“What sort of memory issues?” was Sue’s pointed question.  
  
Two questions at once and Harry was glaring at him with a look that was as sharp as razors, so Ambrose turned to answer Sue. “I had my brain put back in,” he said, ruefully. “That was supposed to cure me of all my memory ills. They didn’t mention in the pamphlet that I’d lose all sense of what I was doing for three to four days at a time when all the work was done.”  
  
“Why are you here?” Harry demanded, his lack of care at Ambrose’s mental predicament clear. “Who gave you that address?”  
  
“I don’t  _know_!” Ambrose spat out, nearly tearing at his hair while Sue slurped at her soup, seemingly uncaring about the fact that he had their house’s address written carelessly on his hand. “I just know I found myself here! I’m as lost as I ever was and I don’t intend any harm. I mean, I think I don’t,” he corrected, wrinkling his nose and hating the cloud of confusion that came with his current situation.   
  
He abandoned argument to try the soup, which appeared to be squash and zucchini of some sort – both items were difficult to get in Central City, lending Ambrose to believe that somewhere in the premises of the sprawling wooden home (that felt more a mansion with its seven bedrooms and three baths, built around an enclosed park and waterfall) was a storage area for vegetables and fruits of the like.   
  
“Very good soup,” Ambrose weakly offered. “The dill really makes it…uh, spike.”  
  
He was met with a smile of approval from Harry, at that, like ice had thawed instantaneously to reveal warm and fuzzy bunny rabbits lurking beneath. “Thank you,” he said.  
  
“You cooked it?” Ambrose asked, gaping for what wouldn’t be the first or the last time. “But you have the…she…”  
  
“Ella does work in exchange for us putting her through school,” Sue explained. “She wouldn’t let us just pay so she puts up this funny little show of serving meals and waiting around the house. Harry cooks all the meals and we all take turns cleaning.” Ella, the diminutive little brunette whose hair was pinned up in at least four ponytails, gave Ambrose a sheepish smile and waved from where she was currently poring over a textbook while wolfing down a sandwich. “Eat up, there’s roast later and Harry’s cooked up a raspberry tart.”  
  
“Took me four hours,” Harry confided, leaning on one forearm to tell Ambrose as if they were talking about hunting animals or something else incredibly manly. His striped button-down was rolled to the sleeves and the elbow creaked as he waved a fresh-baked biscuit at him. “But you’ll taste the difference.”  
  
“I’m sure I will,” Ambrose agreed with a nervous smile, unable to shake the feeling that Harry still didn’t like him for  _something_.   
  
Sue patted him on the back and shared a warm smile with him as she sat forward in her chair, studying Ambrose from her position some feet away. “You’re a thin thing,” she observed bluntly. “Ella, make sure and double his servings. We need to get him good and healthy if he’s going to be staying under our roof.”  
  
“Staying?” Ambrose asked warily.  
  
“You have our address on your hand,” Harry pointed out over a full spoonful of soup.  
  
“You’re here for a reason,” Sue agreed, hand still on his shoulder (thinner, admittedly, ever since the surgery. He just hadn’t had any form of appetite to speak of). “We won’t be letting you go so soon. It might just be that you needed to find us as much as we were meant to find you.” Blue eyes turned somewhat dark as she looked him over. “What’s your name, son?”  
  
“Ambrose,” he answered, feeling somewhat like he was outside of the room, like he was watching this scene and missing something. There was something in the room he could use as a clue, but his brain refused to pinpoint just what it was. They settled when he said his name and shared yet another look, one that made Ambrose wonder just how much was spoken between the two of them with just a look alone. “Ambrose,” he repeated. “Advisor to the Queen.”  
  
“Well, we know that,” Sue blithely remarked. ‘The question is, what’re you doing all the way out here away from your friends and family?”  
  
“I still don’t know,” Ambrose admitted as the roast was served and the soup was taken away. Ella lingered by him and in the mess of her brown hair, he tried to think of DG, to catch a flash of why he had come out here with the information written on his hand, but nothing came to him.   
  
He didn’t know.   
  
Both the roast and the raspberry tart were wonderful from first taste to last and Ambrose made sure to give Harry all the due praise for it (and he smiled, lighting up like a firefly and revealing laugh line upon laugh line as Sue affectionately ran a weathered hand through his thinning hair) and then Ambrose was led to an expansive bedroom by Ella, whose nose was still in a book.  
  
“What are you studying?” Ambrose asked curiously, guiding her away from a pole that she was on an imminent course for.   
  
“If I can get my grades up, I’m hoping to enroll in the Tin Man academy,” Ella said enthusiastically. “Harry and Sue are real big proponents of getting the police force back together because they say it’ll symbolize the restitution of order in Central City which’ll expand out through the O.Z.” She sounded so young and cheerful and positive about it and Ambrose almost remembered those days when he was optimistic.  _Someone’s got to keep your wide-eyed optimism in check_ , said a ghost’s voice and Ambrose nearly had it again, nearly had it! But it was gone. He’d lost some of that optimism when he’d regained his mind and the blackouts still happened without fail. “I need to pass politics and physics, though,” Ella admitted with a heave of a sigh, opening the door to Ambrose’s room. “I’m no good at physics. Can’t wrap my head around the formulas let alone how fast a speeding bullet’s bound to go under water.”  
  
Symbols and letters flitted through Ambrose’s mind and all he managed was, “Lambda.”  
  
“What’d you call me!?” Ella spat out, green eyes fraught with distress and worry and the freckles on her face disappeared in a pink flush of anger.  
  
Ambrose stared uselessly at the now-fired-up girl (who couldn’t have been older than seventeen) staring at him like he’d gone and insulted her, her parents, and possibly her favorite toy as a child. His mouth opened and closed in confusion until he stumbled upon some kind of explanation. “It’s the symbol! The symbol for wave particles! Physics,” he insisted, babbling on and on.   
  
“Oh,” Ella exhaled and seemed to let her anger deflate as she gestured to a pair of pressed pale-blue pajamas lying on the bed. “This’ll be your room until you go, but Harry and Sue say you ought to stick around until you’ve got some meat on your bones.”  
  
Ambrose grinned and let out a laugh, but Ella didn’t seem like she was bound to join in the laughter.  
  
“They’re serious, mister,” she promised with a brusque nod of her head. “Breakfast’s at eight.” She closed the door as she left, nearly deafening Ambrose when she shouted, ‘he’s in his room!’ down the hall to someone who was bound to have asked and as he tried to stop the ringing in his head, he turned to give the room a long look.   
  
And before he could forget, he transcribed the numbers on his palm to a piece of paper on the writing desk nearby, setting the quill down atop the parchment when he was through and just studying the numbers.  
  
 _Why had they been there? Why would he need to be here at this house?_  
  
Whatever quiet thoughts he’d been trying to mull on were interrupted by heavy footfalls sprinting past his door and he abandoned the quest for deep thoughts while he was under this roof, climbing into both bed and the pajamas and wondering what he was missing, what was lurking just outside of his consciousness that could put all this together and remove the mental block that refused to lift.   
  
He fell asleep to the drifting sounds of Harry and Sue having a conversation somewhere nearby and every once in a while there came a familiar name and the hint of knowledge that Ambrose wanted to know about, but he felt as though he hadn’t slept in three days and the dreams and the darkness came on swiftly, ruling out the notion of eavesdropping even the tiniest snatches of conversation.  
  
Morning came peacefully and Ambrose didn’t rouse until birds outside his window bade him awake. The sun spilled in the window and painted the floor a pale yellow and Ambrose turned slightly in comfortable sheets, trying to pinpoint where he was when it came to him.   
  
There were joyful sounds outside his door and it didn’t take long for him to realize that it was Ella shrieking and pounding down the hall. “Come back here! Trigger! Trigger, stop it!” she shouted and when Ambrose opened the door, he found Ella playing tug-of-war with a golden retriever with something of a wolf’s look about the face. She peered up at him, hair a knotty mess in a tight bun and grinned brilliantly with slightly crooked teeth. “Ambrose, meet Trigger. He’s the house pet.”  
  
The dog let out a bark and nearly pounced on Ambrose.  
  
Were it not for his impeccable (occasional) balance, he might have been pushed to the ground, but he managed to steady himself at the last minute and wrapped his arms around the dog as if it were a person. “Trigger,” he weakly said. “Enthusiastic thing.”  
  
“That he is,” Ella agreed warmly, whistling. “C’mon Trigger!” She trotted off down the hall in a brisk half-run. “Sue wants to see you out front! Says she found something in the valley where they found you!”  
  
Ambrose watched her go, half in the hall (despite his lack of dress) and shouted a “Hey!” in Ella’s direction, but she had already run out the door, leaving Ambrose with only the lead that Sue was in the front and she had something.   
  
What she had was his embroidered bag and letters in her hand. He’d taken those letters because…because…why did he take those letters?  
  
“These are all stamped for the Longview Post,” Sue remarked, pilfering through and keeping one in every three. “Why are you acting a courier when you ought to be inventing things back in that shining palace?”  
  
“I don’t know,” Ambrose said again and had the feeling he was going to get  _very_  tired of saying that. “I really don’t.” He tilted his head to one side and looked at the array of letters, noticing that some of them were addressed to a SUSAN & HARRY, the ones that were being kept. “You know someone in Central,” he realized with a warm smile, seeing as it somehow gave him a tie beyond the fact that he was being clothed, provided for, and fed by these people.   
  
“We have family there, at least…since the Witch fell,” Sue agreed tersely. The subject seemed to be off-limits and Ambrose didn’t know if he had pushed too far, just yet. Everyone had lost someone in the Witch’s War, it felt like (Ambrose himself had lost parents and a sister, from what the histories said) and to have met someone who  _didn’t_  lose family was the true miracle. “We’ve got more nieces and nephews around these parts, though. They settled around us when peace came about. They’re doing good work in the mines and the fields, not to mention in the little inns in the villages.”  
  
Ambrose offered a sympathetic smile and he sat to rifle through his bag, digging out various items until he came to a carved horse with a bullet in it. “This isn’t mine,” he realized aloud, brain straining to recall something. Had he told Cain that he was taking the horse? And why would he have it? Why would Cain willingly part with one of his most treasured items?   
  
He tucked away the horse before he could be asked what it was (and that was a difficult thing to explain when he knew what it _was_ , just not why he had it).  
  
“What isn’t yours, son?” Sue asked, glancing his way.  
  
Ambrose pulled out one of the guns tucked away in the depths of the bag because that…definitely wasn’t his either. “This.” And he wasn’t lying about that.   
  
He let Sue pry it from his hands and he didn’t even protest when she was on her feet, bellowing for Harry. “Sorry, Ambrose, we’ve got business. Serve yourself some breakfast and enjoy the grounds, why don’t you? Just make sure to stay away from the woods. Black bears lurk there, these days.”  
  
She was gone in a flash before Ambrose could even ask why she’d taken such an interest in the gun that wasn’t his. He rubbed a hand over his aching-head, glancing to the trees and the waterfall in the middle of the sprawling house and debated a wander through them.  
  
He supposed it couldn’t hurt.  
  
By the time he reached the inner sanctum of the waterfall, his head was throbbing and Ella was perched on one of the low-lying trees poring through a thick tome. “Physics?” Ambrose asked, to which she nodded and angrily flicked a page over. “That bad?”  
  
“I don’t see why I have to know this,” she muttered, digging out something from her bag and holding it out. “Here, eat,” she said, gesturing with her chin to the banana bread she was holding out to him. “Sue says our mission is to get some meat on your bones, plus you probably need something being that you haven’t eaten breakfast.”  
  
“How did you…”  
  
“Harry’s put it all away now and you’re still in your bedclothes,” Ella said distractedly. “Do you know any Tin Men?”  
  
“Just one,” Ambrose said wryly. “A stubborn one, but he did well by the force.”  
  
“Did he have to learn about physics?”  
  
It was a good question and one he didn’t know the answer to. He was sure Cain must have studied physics as it was a required course like all the others that were demanded at the Tin Man Academy, but it both never came up and was never offered by Cain as something he knew. Then, they hadn’t exactly stopped to discuss motors and gravity while running for their lives.   
  
“It’s very important,” Ambrose half-lied. “It makes you look smart.”  
  
“Glasses can make me look smart,” Ella complained, shutting the book with a thud and jumping to her feet. “C’mon, I’ll show you the shooting range. You know how to fire a gun?”  
  
“No, but I know the physics involved.”  
  
He was met with a glower for that, but Ambrose was grinning away. She followed, though, and he marked that a success – even if he did have to swallow half a loaf of banana bread, a bag of raisins, and several pieces of bread on the way. At this rate, they were going to have him fattened like a turkey. He just hoped there wasn’t a guillotine at the end of this tunnel.   
  
What he appreciated most of all, though, was that when he started talking about trajectories and much more of that ‘eugh, physics stuff’ that Ella complained about, she seemed to not only listen, but learn.  
  
It almost put him at ease, despite the fact that he still had absolutely no idea what was going on.  
  
**  
  
It seemed that Harry and Sue bred routine and ritual in their house and Ambrose quickly fell into their tutelage to learn the ins and outs. He still didn’t know why he was there, but he knew that breakfast was served at eight and then house chores were done followed by study and training after lunch (the training was not optional, despite the fact that Harry was in his early seventies and Sue was pushing the seven-zero figure). Dinner was served punctually at seven and reading and conversation was had until bed.  
  
Days of that had been calming, but weeks had lulled Ambrose into a sense of security.   
  
Not only that, but the regular meals that were being pushed into him had actually allowed him to gain back all the weight he had lost after the surgery and then some, but training kept it so that he wouldn’t grow  _too_  much of a belly. Not only that, but Ambrose had grown used to the company that was kept. Occasionally, former-Resistance workers would pass through for meals and more often than not, Sue’s bespoken-of nieces and nephews dropped by for dinner.  
  
“You’re taking Mara out to dinner next week,” Sue said while they folded clothes in one of the spare rooms. Mara was one of the nieces with curly golden hair, who constantly wore a golden heart pendant against her tanned skin. She was willowy and beautiful and Ambrose had found himself occasionally staring at her and trying to place where he knew her from.  
  
Sue had taken that as reason to set them up.   
  
“Am I?”  
  
“She says you should dress fancy, you’re going to the little restaurant on the hill near here, in Amberlea.”   
  
“Ah.” Ambrose really didn’t know what else he was supposed to say to that and one of the things he’d learned was that he was not to disobey what Sue wanted because she would then smother you to death with good intentions, trying to fix it. It was best to go along with whatever she wanted, let it run its course, and then move on.   
  
She placed the brunt of the folded laundry in his arms, wiping her hands on her trousers as she nodded to the linen closet they belonged to. “Just in there,” she instructed, tucking away a wisp of hair, and at the sound of the front door bell being rung, she caught Ambrose’s eye. “Get that, will you? I’m going to help Harry with the garden out back.”  
  
“Yes, Ma’am,” he said politely, closing the door lightly before hurrying to the door.  
  
Whoever was there kept ringing and ringing the bell impatiently and Ambrose had a curse or three ready for whoever it was (he would put platinums on it being the little children from down the road who seemed to enjoy this little game of ring-and-run far too much).   
  
“Coming!” he assured, “coming, coming, coming…” And as he drew the door open, he plastered on his best grin. “How can I help…you…Cain?” Ambrose asked, shock overtaking him as he gaped at the man in the doorway.  
  
“Ambrose,” Cain said, sounding just as shocked. “What are you doing here?”  
  
“What am…what am I doing here? Thank the gods you’re here, I thought no one would ever get my letters!” he said, letting out a laugh of relief and nearly pouncing on Cain to hug him tightly. “I’ve been out here for weeks and no one’s written anything back! How did you find me? Did you track the letters?”  
  
“I didn’t come here for you, Ambrose,” Cain said slowly, his words filled with confusion as he eased back from the hug to study him curiously. “Why are you here?” he asked, again.   
  
Before Ambrose could answer, or demand to know why it mattered so much, there was the sound of an elated shriek and a deep laugh behind him.   
  
“Wyatt!”  
  
“There he is.”  
  
Ambrose waffled as Harry and Sue went rushing past him. In an instant flat, Sue wrapped her arms snugly around Cain while Harry patted him on the back and Ambrose had to remind himself that it was only natural that they would know him. He had been in the Resistance, after all, and Harry and Sue’s outpost was one of the more visited ones along the path. Except that most of the scouts and soldiers that passed didn’t get Sue kissing them on their cheek or Harry ruffling their hair.  
  
“Uh…”  
  
Cain glanced up from all the attention he was receiving and brushed himself off, nodding curtly to Ambrose. “Like I was saying,” he continued. “I didn’t come here for you, Ambrose. I came to visit my parents.”  
  
“And me!”  
  
“And Ella,” he corrected himself, earning a smack on the shoulder from the spirited young woman in question. Cain just laughed deeply and tugged her into a hug before they set off in the midst of a conversation about what Jeb was doing and Cain inquiring as to her studies.  
  
Ambrose, for lack of a better term, had been left back in the dust, gaping over this new development as he tried to settle all the pieces into place. It explained many things, like why he had a trinket of Cain’s (probably to show his parents for safe passage) and why he knew the address and had it written on his hand. Of course, he still didn’t know the  _why_  of why he was there, but it’d come eventually.  
  
For the moment, he was preoccupied with the fact that his gaze was swiveling back and forth between Sue and Harry. “He’s your son. Wyatt Cain is your son?” Ambrose asked, disbelief writ all over his face.  
  
“Is that bad?” Sue asked, still smiling away.  
  
“You…I…” Ambrose blinked and a headache was coming on strong at all the information that was coming too quickly and without abandon. “I’m  _Glitch_! He said he wrote about me all the time to a couple out here in the Spires.”  
  
“Why do you think we’ve been taking such good care of you?” Harry asked, shaking his head. “I’m going back to work. Send Wyatt along when he’s through with Ella’s lessons.”  
  
“You got it, sweetheart,” Sue promised, kissing him on the cheek as he went. “Ambrose, come on with me, before you pass out in shock.”  
  
He went along because he had the feeling if he didn’t, there would be a righteous smacking from Sue and after the morning he was having, he didn’t want to add that to the grand list of things he had experienced. Just because he was going along didn’t mean he was willing to do it quietly, though.  
  
“Your son is Cain,” Ambrose said again, as if saying it enough times aloud would somehow make the thoughts settle.  
  
“For forty-five annuals, yes,” agreed Sue. “Any other obvious statements you feel compelled to make?” She had a hint of a smirk on her lips and Ambrose felt as if he wanted to wring out his hair and figure out what had brought him here in the first place and why he hadn’t bothered to  _tell_  anyone where he was going. “Don’t you fret about this. We’ll sort it at dinner tonight. Wyatt’s staying for two weeks seeing as he’s still trying to figure out what to do with his life.”  
  
“And you thought you could help?” Ambrose remarked with a rueful smile. It seemed the thing for parents to do.  
  
“Actually, he did.” Sue gestured with her head. “Now come on. The grapes need picking if we’re going to produce wine this season and I’ve the feeling you’ve got excellent stamping toes on you.”  
  
*  
  
He was still stamping grapes when Cain found him. Well, ‘stamping grapes’ was a generous term for it. What he was actually doing was panting as he leaned over the wooden edge of the vat, sweat dripping into the juice. It was going to be a salty batch this annual, at the rate he was going.   
  
“So I didn’t tell you  _or_  anyone that I was coming here?” Ambrose asked as he tried to catch his breath. Sue had been right about one thing. Right before she’d left him to it, she’d made a wry comment about how  _good_  it could be to just get all your anger and irritation out when it came to stomping the grapes and Ambrose had been pouring all his available energy into that. “Not even DG, not Raw? Why would I do that? Why would you let me?!”  
  
It wasn’t a secret that he’d been having the ‘episodes’ of blacking out and had been under close surveillance for a great deal of time. He couldn’t imagine that anyone would just let him wander away without a fuss. Unless he snuck out…? No, but then people would have been searching. At least, he hoped they would be.   
  
“You said you needed to do this one thing,” Cain said evenly, resting his palms high up on the barrier between him and Ambrose and let the barrel pull at his muscles. Ambrose leaned down and over Cain and from the angle he was at, could barely see anything past his hat. “You never really clarified what that ‘one thing’ was, but you made a big deal about you being left out. We tried to stop you. I’m pretty sure DG tried to put a protective spell around your room, but you got out. And we knew you’d taken care of yourself with only half a brain…”  
  
“So you gave me the benefit of the doubt,” Ambrose realized with a sigh. “I guess that was what I wanted. But Cain, I had your parents’ address on me. Literally on me. And I think I stole the horse you carved for Jeb?” he added, voice slightly anxious and was well-deserved seeing as Cain tipped his head up to level Ambrose with a heavy glare. “Sorry?”  
  
“I thought I’d lost that,” he muttered. “Are you done up there?”  
  
“No, I was about to take out my frustrations against the Longcoats and Zero?” He paused where he was and suddenly a brilliant, genius smile took over and he extended both hands to Cain. “Wanna help?”  
  
Ambrose’s smile turned just a smidgen more mischievous as Cain reached out both hands and clasped tight onto Ambrose’s wrists, letting him haul the other man up into the grapes with him, even cushioning him when he stumbled and he wrapped one arm around Cain’s waist to make sure he didn’t do something stupid like give himself a concussion on the sides.  
  
The moment drew out, slightly awkward, and Ambrose stared up at Cain as he felt his throat begin to dry and questions crumbled there. “Did you and DG and Raw want to come after me?” he asked curiously.  
  
“I was coming here to ask my parents what I ought to do about my life,” Cain admitted. “We just figured you’d find your way home at some point.”  
  
“I had no idea your parents were still alive.”  
  
“It never came up in our conversations,” Cain said, releasing himself slowly from Ambrose as he pried off boots and socks – already heavily stained in grapes, but Cain didn’t seem to mind. “You and I were always bickering about therapy or what my career ought to be or just talking and we never talked about our families.”  
  
“We should have,” Ambrose said, as if suddenly determined. “Cain, we should have.”  
  
“So, thinking of Zero, you said?”  
  
“His face, his coat or his…wait. If Sue and Harry are your parents, then Mara is your cousin!” Ambrose announced, the epiphany hitting him like a particularly strong bolt of lightning. He gaped at Cain and nearly needed to steady himself before he went face-first into a vat of particularly noxious grapes.   
  
Cain glanced up from picking skins from off his toes, throwing his hat down over the side to join his boots. “Yeah,” he said slowly. “Did you want to see the family tree?”  
  
“No, I just…” Ambrose blinked, trying to accustom himself to seeing Harry, Sue, and the rest in this new light. He had been enjoying Cain hospitality the whole of the time he’d been under the roof (the one he had no intention of leaving just yet and he had a feeling if he did try and go, Sue and Ella might just bind him down with  _chains_ ). “Huh. That’s going to be a weird date.”  
  
Something he said was funny because Cain had bowed his head down low and had started to laugh, garnering a sulking reaction from Ambrose.   
  
“What!”  
  
“Just…you and Mara,” Cain said, glancing up and though he was smiling, there was something else lurking deep in his eyes that wasn’t as pleased as the rest of him seemingly was. “I hope you don’t mind if I lurk at a table nearby and observe the carnage.”  
  
“Wyatt,” Ambrose scolded sharply.  
  
“Or not,” Cain teasingly replied. “Just be sure your wallet’s full because by the end of the night, it won’t be. Mara’s always liked the finest of things. She’s driven off two boyfriends and a girlfriend because her tastes ran the gamut of too much.” At Ambrose’s look of somewhat horror, Cain leaned over and clasped a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry. She’s a real fun woman to be around. You two will have a great time, I bet anything.”  
  
The shock and horror were still combining to produce something of a bemusing sight on Ambrose’s face and Cain clapped him once more on the shoulder and gave a patient smile.  
  
“You’re not very encouraging,” Ambrose muttered.  
  
“No, I think bitter cynicism was how someone once put it,” Cain agreed and groaned as he lifted himself from the grapes and started to clean his feet off in a waiting tub of water. “Come on, my father’ll get those fermenting and you have to help with dinner, I hear.”  
  
“Everything runs smoothly in the Cain household,” Ambrose agreed sarcastically, yanking on Cain’s arm to help him out of the tub of grapes. “And everything  _works_ , especially the guests.”  
  
“Annuals of learning that laziness begets death,” Cain’s reply was dark and hinted at what Ambrose already knew – people lost too much in the war and they had lost it through the mistakes they had been too slow to prevent. “Go on. I owe my mother a long talk about where my life is going.”  
  
Ambrose dawdled, walking backwards towards the house as he raised an expectant brow. “And?”  
  
“I didn’t exactly map it out before I came,” was Cain’s frustrated sigh of an answer. “Go inside. If my father asks where my life is headed, tell him North.”  
  
Ambrose waved before turning around and contemplating Cain’s predicament as he went inside. He had refused quite audibly to become a Tin Man again and had made a show of turning down every job offer that came his way, from personal protection, to Central Security Systems, to construction, to lecturer, even. Ambrose imagined if his own parents were alive, that kind of behaviour was bound to earn him a ‘what are you doing with your life, boy?’ speech.   
  
“Got the grapes?” Harry boomed out when Ambrose opened the creaky screen door, wielding a bucket’s worth of them. Leaning out from the kitchen, Harry caught sight and boasted a maniacal and manly grin. “Good. Come on, let’s get those buddies fermenting before you and I glaze the roast.”  
  
Ambrose followed along in the wake that was Harry Cain, having the feeling that many a stronger man had fallen powerless to that same pull of charisma and grit.  
  
And he’d once wondered where Cain got it from.   
  
Ambrose scoffed to think that some people were far, far too easy to explain once you had seen their parents and what they could do with squished, thick, blue-juice grapes.  
  
**  
  
Ambrose was sneaking in the back door of the house at two in the morning and praying to the gods that it wouldn’t creak like…  
  
 _Crrrrrrrrkk_.  
  
Like that.  
  
“Fiddlecraps,” Ambrose cursed under his breath as the lights went on and suddenly Trigger was barking up a storm and Ella was awake (if her shouts were any indication) and Harry was booming out words and that meant Sue and Cain would be down in no time to find out if they had an intruder. Or worse, they’d be down to…  
  
“How’d it go?” Sue immediately interrogated, wrapping her housecoat tighter around herself as she gestured Ambrose inside with an arm wrapped snugly around his back.   
  
He sighed and tried to ignore Ella knotting her hair into a side-ponytail and bounding to his other side, batting eyelashes dreamily up at him and puckering her lips. “Didja kiss her?” Ella asked, affecting a swoon. “Ambrose, oh Ambrose, kissy kiss me,” she squealed as Ambrose pushed her lightly away and laughed as she rejoined him. “Did she at least ‘thank’ you for the dinner?” she asked, in a far more lascivious tone.   
  
“Ella,” Cain said warningly.   
  
“Oh, please, Wyatt, I’m not a baby anymore,” she retorted. “I know all about the way Mara likes to thank men for dinner.” She made a perfect ‘o’ of her lips and blew a kiss Ambrose’s way with a mischievous smirk on her lips. She gave another shriek of a laugh as Ambrose gave a firmer (yet still playful) push and she pushed right back. “Are you going to see her again?”  
  
Ambrose sank down into the chair that Sue had guided him to and tried to pick just one person to look at while he answered. Due to proximity, that person was Ella and he tugged lightly at her ponytail. “No,” he said, lightly to cover the fact that this issue went far, far deeper than it appeared to go. “She’s…not my type.”  
  
Sue got a thoughtful look on her face, chewing the inside of her cheek at that. “Right.”  
  
“Right?” Cain asked, the word echoed by Ambrose who said it at exactly the same time.  
  
“We set him up with Philip.”  
  
That seemed to be something that wasn’t supposed to be said because Cain was leveling a piercing glare in Sue’s direction. “Mother,” he half-growled. “Are you joking? You want to send Ambrose off on a date with Philip where they might not always be in public?”  
  
“What’s wrong with Philip?” Ambrose asked warily, gaze darting rapidly between Cain and Sue. “Wha…”  
  
“He’s a tart,” Ella whispered to him, perched on the armrest of the chair Ambrose had been sat in. “Tight trousers, hardly likes to wear sleeves, and his eyes are doused in the best of makeup. He’s  _pretty_ , but Sue won’t let me near him because she says I’m too young.”  
  
“Ella,” Harry patiently spoke up for the first time all evening. “Ain’t it time for you to go to bed?”   
  
Ella glanced up and took one look at Harry’s face before she sighed and gave a tired nod, pushing to her feet and ruffling Ambrose’s hair lightly. “Night, player,” she said, sidling off and corralling Sue as she went. “Trigger’s whining again, I think he needs a good belly rub,” she said, to give Sue an excuse to leave, as well.  
  
Ambrose watched Ella and thanked the gods for her quick thinking and thanked them doubly so when he was left with only Harry and Cain and when they were side-by-side, he didn’t know how he could have missed them for anything but father and son. It wasn’t a match, but it was a resemblance. Or maybe it was just in the way that they carried themselves.  
  
He sighed wearily and stared up at the two men, who both looked at him expectantly.  
  
“What?” he asked, because neither of them seemed to be asking anything, even though they looked like they wanted to. As if synchronized, they folded their arms over their broad torsos and the silence reigned on. Ambrose wasn’t sure how much of The Amazing Male Cain Synchronized Show he could take when it was nearly three in the morning, so he turned to Cain with a tired look on his face and tried to plead wordlessly for an end to this debacle.  
  
Cain took a step forward and broke free of the tense hold he had on his own arms. “Say no about Philip,” he advised gravely.  
  
“We’ll find you someone else,” Harry pitched in. “Sue, she gets excited seeing as Philip’s tended to give men and women a good time, but it’s never anything more than a night out. We want more than that for you.”  
  
Ambrose looked up from his chair and met Cain’s eyes, trying to seek out whether Cain agreed with that, but he couldn’t see past the icy exterior and he was too tired to delve deeper.   
  
“Come on to bed,” Harry encouraged. “I’ll put in a call to Richard.” He glanced over Cain’s way. “You remember your cousin Richard, Wy? He’s the one who took over the post office when all went down the drain and managed to double the efficiency. I think you’ll like him,” he said, offering a hand out to Ambrose to help him up from his lazy sit. With one last look at Cain and one worried check with Harry, he was happy to retire to bed and try and wipe the smell of cologne from him with as much soap as was needed.  
  
And then, apparently, he was going to try again with ‘Richard’.  
  
*  
  
Several days later, the doorbell rang while Ambrose was developing an irrigation system for the Cains’ vegetable garden. They had been determined to get him to gain even more weight and apparently could see the difference in his face (“not so scarily gaunt,” was Sue’s favourite way of putting it), but they still wouldn’t let him go. Calls were put in and he had a date with Richard in a week’s time.   
  
“Anyone else going to get that?” Ambrose called out from his small workspace in the sunroom near the back-porch.   
  
Cain was in town to get parts for the garage (filled with cars that the Cains had salvaged and now worked on sporadically), Ella was at school, Harry was in the gardens, and Sue seemed to be nowhere around.   
  
“I guess I am,” Ambrose muttered, prying his gloves off of his hands and rubbing at stains on his face with the back of his hand, feeling rather felinesque in the gesture. He pried off his labcoat and goggles and cursed again under his breath when the bell kept being rung with endless fervour, again and again. He ran quickly and with Glitch’s grace through halls he’d become accustomed to (even if he still wasn’t quite aware why he’d  _gone_  there) until he was at the front door.  
  
He opened it to greet whatever wayward former-Resistance member it might be and nearly swallowed his tongue when he saw who it  _really_  was.  
  
“Glitch?” Two voices echoed as one as they stared at him, broken apart from their subdued prior conversation.   
  
“Jeb.” Okay, that one made sense. He was Harry and Sue’s grandson and would typically visit being that it seemed all the Cains were programmed to put family before all else, but…“DG?”  
  
“Wha…t are you doing here?” DG slowly tried to puzzle that one out curiously, staring at him with those wide blue eyes of hers that always seemed to make everything in the nearby vicinity pale in comparison. “When you said you were going to figure out what was ‘so very great’ about what we were doing, we thought you just meant…well, maybe Central City.”  
  
“What are you doing here?” Ambrose asked in turn. “Not you, Jeb, clearly you have cause.”  
  
Jeb seemed to acknowledge that with a raise of both brows, pushing into the house to leave Ambrose to his conversation with DG, calling out a ‘Grandma! Grandpa! I’m here’ before he left Ambrose’s earshot. DG was staring at him warily and Ambrose was staring back and right now, they were the only two people under that roof without a cause to be and Ambrose was hoping DG would fill in the blanks on his cause.  
  
“What am I doing here?” Ambrose finally asked. “I woke up nearby with this address on my hand and a bunch of Cain’s things in my bag.”  
  
“I think you got a bit irked that we were always going back and forth and leaving,” DG admitted, offering a small shrug. “I mean, after the surgery, after you were going to live and that was sure, Mr. Cain started spending most of his time here and then Jeb followed suit, so I came along to keep him company on his trips.”  
  
“Met the grandparents already, have you?” Ambrose asked slyly. “Is it really that serious?”  
  
“Well, after he accidentally pelted pebbles at my mother’s window thinking it was mine, he said he’d drag me here and have them smother me to death,” DG retorted dryly. “Besides, it’s nice here. Loud, but nice.” She threaded her arm with Ambrose’s and tugged him inside. “You know, if you’d said you were coming here, you could have joined us instead of running away on your little spirit journey which you just ‘had to do on your own’.” She leaned her cheek against his shoulder, wandering into the depths of the house to the small balcony that overlooked the park below.  
  
Cain was down there now, with Ella, and Jeb had joined along, enduring things being pelted at him from both of the others.  
  
“Hey, can I join?” DG called down.   
  
“Sure, just bring Trigger with,” Cain called back up. He disappeared from sight just as DG relinquished her hold on Ambrose and they traded places smoothly – up for down and down for up. DG picked up several of the fuzzy-yellows balls lying about and started to join Ella in throwing them at Jeb, who did his best to dodge them, even as Trigger started prancing around him and barking eagerly.  
  
Ambrose couldn’t help his grin, laughing warmly when Jeb was tackled to the ground not by the dog, but by Ella.   
  
“She’s …enthusiastic,” Ambrose noted to Cain, glancing over his shoulder to find him being joined. “So, DG tells me I threw a fit because everyone was visiting your parents and that I wanted to know what was so great. That’s why, and I’m still patching this theory together, that I stole your things and came out here to see what sort of place could pull all of you away from your new homes.”  
  
“Is that it?” Cain asked, something in his tone sounding disapproving – or maybe that was just Ambrose’s imagination, as he had expected something of the sort. “I thought you were going to go seek your soul or some other crap a psychiatrist might say.”  
  
“Have you been seeing a psychiatrist to find out what they’d say?” Ambrose asked, delight jumping around in his eyes and an ‘I told you so!’ on his lips, but Cain gave a grunt that didn’t seem to serve as any answer at all. “And maybe I am finding myself. This is as good a place as any, even if I had to…and my apologies… crash your parents’ house to find it.”  
  
“If you really want them to quit it with the parade of my relatives, you just have to say,” Cain advised, leaning his forearms over the railing of the deck.   
  
“No, it’s fine,” Ambrose assured, giving Cain a wayward and worried look. “You don’t have any siblings, do you? I think that might cross a line, somewhere.” What sort of line, he wasn’t sure. One that was in the back of his mind and existed for the sole purpose that one day, Ambrose might be able to name it.  
  
Cain’s expression went slack and something dark passed over his face. “I used to have a sister,” he said, lightly. “Ella was her goddaughter.”  
  
“The Witch’s War?” Ambrose asked carefully.  
  
“No. No, just…” Cain sighed and rubbed a hand over his face. “Just an accident before any of that. She was younger than me by three annuals, had it in her head that she wanted to explore the world, like a certain Princess we know. She never came back, one time. We got a letter saying they found her car wrecked along the road.”  
  
Ambrose fell to silence at that, any jokes about marrying into the Cain family falling by the wayside and he rested an awkward hand on Cain’s shoulder to try and comfort him.  
  
“I really do mean it when I say we should talk about our families more,” Ambrose said, voice hushed and hoarse as they watched the happy scene below. “I lost my sister too, but I lost her and my parents to the Witch.” He craned his neck to look up at Cain’s face and tilted him in Ambrose’s direction to look at him properly, feeling closer than ever before and something in him turned into worry, like Cain might see through him and discover something about him that not even Ambrose knew. “Cain…”  
  
Cain drew his gaze away from his son to turn and look Ambrose in the eyes and for a moment, they might have said something genuine, but that moment passed and Cain lightly pried Ambrose’s hand off of his shoulder.  
  
“You ought to call Richard,” Cain advised quietly. “He’ll want to know what your dinner preferences are before he makes reservations.”  
  
“Yeah,” Ambrose half-sighed out the word, sounding unsure about even a simple agreement he had given a thousand times before. “I’ll call.”  
  
And then Cain slipped away like Ambrose had never had his hand on him to keep him in place.  
  
**  
  
The house had grown even louder with the addition of Jeb and DG -- who shared a room on the opposite side of the house -- and now in addition to Harry and Sue’s nightly conversations, Ella’s playful running after Trigger and Cain’s slow pacing around the house, there was the sound of DG and Jeb settling into their room.   
  
The new house arrangements were also the precise thing that brought Cain to Ambrose’s room, shoving a pillow at him and closing the door behind him. “Cain?”  
  
“I am not sleeping on the east wing of the house while they are doing  _that_ ,” he half-growled the words, storming inside and dropping a handful of blankets on the reclining chair before yanking the pillow out of Ambrose’s hands, settling for the night – as he was already clad in a pair of pale pajamas.   
  
The east wing held four rooms all within hearing distance of each other and one was Cain’s room (and had been since he was a boy). Ambrose had been staying on the west side in a room beside Ella’s and down the hall from Harry and Sue’s. He was trying to puzzle out what was going on and just why that meant he suddenly had to give up his privacy.  
  
“You can’t stay with Ella?” he asked mildly. It didn’t take much time for him to receive a dour glare at the suggestion. “Or not.” And the notion of Cain sleeping in his parents’ room brought up several amusing images that probably should never be enacted, for the dignity of all involved. Ambrose sighed as he burrowed under the covers and tried to ignore all the crashing around that Cain seemed intent on doing while he was getting into the chair. “What! Is such a problem!” he snapped.  
  
“They’re having sex,” Cain spat out the words, seeming to choke on each and every one, having more than a slight bit of difficulty. “And I can hear it  _all_.”  
  
Ambrose cringed on Cain’s behalf and hoped that the sounds from the other wing of the house wouldn’t carry this far. When Cain wasn’t settling, Ambrose grasped one of the extraneous pillows and pelted it in Cain’s direction. “I get that you’re being a priggish father who doesn’t want to hear his son and DG having sex, but it doesn’t mean you have to keep me from sleeping!”  
  
He settled again with a heavy ‘thump’ of his head against the pillow and Cain stopped rustling around.  
  
…and it turned out that yes, in fact, you could hear what was going on in the other wing if you let the room fall to abject silence.   
  
Ambrose groaned and sat up, giving Cain a pitiful and resigned look. “Go back to rustling,” he muttered. Ambrose thought of DG as a daughter and he was having no issue associating with what Cain was feeling, having to sit there and listen to his son go at it.   
  
Well, if the sounds were any indication, they were both having a lot of fun. Ambrose most certainly didn’t need to know that, however.   
  
He rubbed at his eyes and glanced over to where Cain was looking at him pointedly, as if ‘I told you so’ was about to come tumbling off his lips and Ambrose wasn’t sure how whether he wanted to put up with it, so he just held a hand out. “Can I have my pillow back?” he requested lightly.  
  
Cain tossed it over easily and Ambrose smashed it down over his ears as he tried to block out any and all sounds of DG sleeping with a man – even if it was Jeb Cain who, outside of Raw and Cain, was possibly the only other man in the O.Z. that Ambrose wouldn’t heavily bruise for daring to touch his Princess.  
  
Ambrose fell asleep to the curious wonderment of what this  _meant_  for all of them, if Jeb and DG were  _this_  serious.  
  
He woke up to the light of day spilling into his window and he woke to Wyatt Cain snoring away. The pillow had been abandoned somewhere and Cain seemed to be fast under the spell of a deep sleep. Ambrose had learned (way back when, still having been Glitch) that Cain had a tendency to sleep like the dead and wake in a snap, as if he had grown too fearful to ever sleep through the full night.  
  
He watched him, for a time, thinking of the circumstances and where he was. The clock blared numbers that told him that Sue would be by with a wake-up call soon enough and Ambrose had little time left to put his thoughts into order.  
  
 _Maybe I am finding myself._  
  
His own words came back to him as he watched Cain slumped gracefully in the chair – his large frame somehow making the lack of room work for him – and he sat up slowly, the sheets rustling about him as he debated what came next. Did he ask people questions or go sit naked in the woods somewhere…? How did someone learn to become who they were and not just what they’d been for ten annuals?  
  
“Cain?” Ambrose said simply.  
  
Even a quiet word as such jolted Cain awake and he pushed a hand under his blanket to go for a revolver that wasn’t there. Ambrose simply waited patiently for the little show of masculinity to end before he offered a weary smile that he hoped looked friendly and innocent.  
  
Cain passed a hand over his face and sank deeper into his chair. “They done?”  
  
“I’d hope hours ago, Cain, it’s  _dawn_ ,” Ambrose noted wryly. “How long do you think your parents will let me stay?” he asked curiously, settling himself against the headboard and staring at Cain, trying not to let his morning-thoughts carry away into the terrible notion that they would kick him out as soon as he had given them enough inventions to make up for the food he ate.  
  
Cain just groaned, shoving his blanket up, and his feet hit the floor with a heavy ‘thud’. “Ambrose, if you wanted, they’d let you stay here forever. Why do you think Ella is still around?”  
  
“She said they were putting her through school.”  
  
“And she never wanted to leave. Her cousins tried to take her home with them when she was thirteen,” Cain explained, wandering the room and borrowing the hairbrush to push it through the small tendrils of wayward hair on his head, before Ambrose could even protest. “She wanted to stay here. My parents were only too happy to oblige.”  
  
Ambrose processed that while he watched Cain moved through his room like a native, plucking open a drawer and digging out a pair of denims and a workshirt before he kicked it closed with a waiting foot. If Ambrose had ever forgotten that this was Cain’s home, he’d be instantly reminded in the moments watching him move around it as if he could do it with his eyes closed.  
  
“Come on, my mother’s bound to knock down your door in ten minutes,” Cain encouraged, wandering around to the far side of the bed so he could nudge at Ambrose. “I’m heading to town today, so keep an eye on Jeb and DG for me, will you? Make sure Ella doesn’t convince them to do anything too insane.”  
  
“What could she possibly do?” Ambrose tiredly sighed as he rolled out of bed.  
  
“Well, jumping off the waterfall into the jagged rocks is a prime concern, but wandering the bear-infested forests runs a close second. So does playing with the paintball guns that are loaded with real ammo half the time,” Cain said.  
  
“Okay, watching the kids,” Ambrose hurriedly agreed. Cain was gone in the flash of an eye and before Ambrose could even change into his clothes for the day, Sue was trying to knock down his door with capable fists, pounding away as hard as she could. He groaned and fell into a sit on the bed, letting his head hit the pillow hard. “Can’t I sleep in, just today?”  
  
“Harry says he needs you to show him how to use the fancy new spatula you cooked up,” she directed. “Else there’ll be no pancakes to be had.”  
  
“M’coming,” Ambrose sleepily mumbled.  
  
When he got to breakfast and found DG and Jeb sitting over cups of orange juice and trying to look as innocent as they could, Ambrose made sure to level them with the most intense of displeased glowers.  
  
“Good morning, Glitch,” DG said happily, clearly in a much better mood than Ambrose was. But then, she probably hadn’t had nightmares of being dragged to a room where his parents were having sex, then a room where DG was, and then yet another where the Queen was performing lewd acts with the baser population of the Realm of the Unwanted.   
  
“Maybe for you,” was his mumbled reply, trudging over to the stove to help with the raspberry pancakes and stir the caramel syrup. “Did you hear it too?” he asked Harry as he started to warm up the spatula (he’d installed a nifty little device that warmed it, meaning you could warm a pancake while it was sitting on the conductive metal of the spatula).  
  
“Hear what?”  
  
“The…you know. Jeb and…”  
  
“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Harry insisted with a growl in his tone, a look in his eye being very clear about the fact that he did  _not_  in any way want to discuss any of the noises that had plagued the house last night.  
  
“Well, I heard,” announced a cheerful and sarcastic voice from the doorway. “Jeb, seriously. I have enough nightmares as it is, please don’t help them with your inability to  _keep it in your pants_ ,” Ella complained as she sulked heavily, sitting at the table and prying a glass of water for herself.  
  
“Actually, it was DG’s…mmgphf.” Whatever Jeb had been trying to say was covered by DG’s palm clapping over his mouth.   
  
She offered a broad and nervous grin. “Yeah-ha, we’ll uh, we’ll make sure that we’re quieter from now on when we play a game of Twister. Really,” she insisted with big, blue, innocent eyes. “That’s all we were doing, Sue. Ella, we swear.”   
  
“Is that what they call it, now,” Harry muttered, flipping over some of the bubbling pancakes, shooting Ambrose a curious look, up and down. “Not that you’re not invited to bring back anyone to your bed, Ambrose. Just mind the noise.”  
  
Suddenly, the conversation had gone from awkward to impossibly worse and Ambrose could feel his cheeks reddening as they went from pink to a tomato red.   
  
“I…H-Harry, I…”  
  
“We don’t have to talk about it. In fact, I’d prefer we don’t,” Harry said sharply, loading the pancakes onto a plate. “But the fact is, you’re a grown man, same as Wy, and you’re entitled to doing whatever you like with your life. Even if that means bringing home one of my nieces or nephews and having sex in the room down the hall from mine.”  
  
Suddenly, Ambrose had the desire to never have sex again in his whole life.  
  
He wondered if that was the same for Jeb and DG, who both looked like they had swallowed something foul.   
  
Ambrose swallowed the awkward feeling in his throat and plastered a smile on his face, nodding to Harry as if to give his consent to the conversation topic, even though he never wanted to talk about this, especially not with Sue and Ella and DG and Jeb in the room. Thank the gods that Cain was away for the day because if he’d been there to listen in on the conversation, Ambrose suspected he might genuinely die of humiliation.   
  
“Let’s just…” Ambrose gestured vaguely to the pan before him. “Let’s just make breakfast.”  
  
*  
  
After the day Ambrose had experienced – Harry seemed to spend the rest of his hours making sure that Ambrose understood that he and Sue wanted to give him the freedom to do whatever he liked while Ambrose tried to make Harry understand that he really didn’t want to discuss any of it – he rewarded himself with a long walk through the park. It was a warm day and it seemed he wasn’t the only one out there by the waterfall, being that he could hear splashing around.  
  
 _Gods, please, if that’s Jeb and DG, let them be wearing clothes_ , he offered a brisk prayer. Though, after their own participation in that morning’s conversation of doom, he doubted they would be doing anything untoward, given that Jeb looked like he might crawl into a hole to avoid further humiliation.  
  
It turned out that Ambrose didn’t need to worry about them because it was just Cain in the water, swimming a gentle breaststroke forward. His coat, vest, and hat sat on a rock nearby and he was swimming in just about all his clothes, the water making them translucent from where Ambrose was walking.   
  
He was by the perimetre, shrouded by trees, and a vague thought in the back of his mind said something like ‘you’re being a stalker’, but he simply kept walking around and around, the soil of the path cushioning his footsteps.   
  
Cain had a slow grace to him as he pushed through the water – and a fog lay low on the pool of water as the waterfall churned a very short distance away – and Ambrose kept on the path as he circled one more time, finding new angles to observe the scene.  
  
It felt so strange to lurk and not say anything, to be the outsider  _willingly_.  
  
Ambrose could swear that something was twisting and turning in his stomach and he couldn’t place it. It could have been envy that Cain had experienced this peaceful home until he chose to  _leave_  it, until Adora had pulled him away. It might have been anger that he hadn’t been told about it after, that Glitch and Ambrose both had been kept in the dark while the others had their respite.  
  
Or it might have been longing.   
  
Ambrose hesitated by a thick evergreens and watched, eyes drawn to Cain’s form and wondering if he should break the silence of the woods – the soft calls of birds, the falling of pinecones, the wind rustling in the trees – and join him. He didn’t, though, stuck where he was as he placed the feeling pushing through him as a mix of everything, but the longing was so wild that he couldn’t attribute it because of this one encounter, of watching Cain stripped of nearly everything.  
  
He’d promised to find himself and he didn’t even know what sort of person he wanted to be with. He’d known, once upon a time, and then he’d been Glitch and now his existence was a cobbling of two lives together and he had to find the meeting of the two and what they wanted.  
  
Cain…well, Cain might be someone he could see himself pursuing, but he wasn’t about to just  _settle_  because he was there and he  _might_  be good for him. He couldn’t just dive in because other people around him had found some modicum of happiness in a relationship. Beyond that, Cain seemed to actually have a healthy amount of respect and friendship for Ambrose and he wasn’t willing to throw that away in a moment of desperation because he wanted to jump the gun and just be with  _someone_  to see if it really afforded that much happiness (or to find out that the happiness was there before and the coupling had no affect on that).  
  
Cain would understand that, Ambrose thought ruefully. More than anyone he would understand why moving on too quickly wasn’t always what people wanted.  
  
So he would go out with Richard and he would date whatever other cousins were pushed his way. If he wanted to find out who he was now, part of that was finding out what sort of people he could stand to be around and which he couldn’t wait to boot to the door. Mara had been the start (well, if he were honest, he’d started when he woke up to Raw, DG, and Cain looking down on him like angels from above) and now Richard. He was sure there was a whole list to go through and he was happy to roll along with the plan.  
  
It was safer to do that. He had no connection to those people, not the way he did to people like Cain and Azkadellia and Raw.   
  
If it failed, he could move on and not damage the important friendships in his life.  
  
He left the woods without ever letting Cain know he was there.  
  
After all, he had a date to prepare for.  
  
**  
  
Richard had been well-educated, well-spoken, well-dressed, well- _everything_  and had appeared to have a genuine interest in Ambrose, to boot. They had dinner, they walked, they discussed the Cain family history and Ambrose was returned back ‘home’ before the midnight hour had even chimed. This time, to avoid a questioning the likes he’d gotten after his date with Mara, he snuck in the bedroom window, some reversal of every teenager’s rebellious phase.  
  
“Gods!” he gasped as he let out a choked howl of shock and fear, having entered the room to find Cain sitting on his bed. “Don’t  _do_  that to me, my circulation isn’t completely up to par yet,” he half-growled, pelting the nearest object at him – which just happened to be balled up socks. “Wait,” he flatly stopped. “What are you doing in my room?”  
  
“Why are you sneaking in the window?” countered Cain.   
  
“Why are you in my bedroom?” Ambrose blankly decided to demand yet again, in the sake of actually answering the question.   
  
Cain was settled on the bed, leaning back until one elbow touched the coverlet. He raised a brow impassively and Ambrose started to close the window behind him, apparently being forced to interpret what a  _look_  meant.  
  
“Sue sent you?” he guessed, because it was the most logical of all the options he might have picked. A quiet nod from Cain came as confirmation and Ambrose groaned aloud. He supposed it was better than having the whole crew picking and poking at him – and it would be far worse, now, with Jeb and DG to join the fray – but that she was checking up on him at all was still maddening. “Well, tell her he’s perfect,” he snapped.  
  
“That should be a good thing,” Cain surmised critically. “And you look like you want to tear his head off for that.”  
  
“Perfect in every possible way a man can be and I felt  _nothing_  all night,” Ambrose muttered distractedly. “Where are my pants?” He barely had time to look up before Cain pelted the pajama bottoms over his way and he caught them, sighing as he did. “When someone is that amazing, I should be falling over myself trying to make him feel something for me, so…what the hell, Cain!”  
  
“Maybe after so long being splintered and strange, perfect doesn’t fit anymore,” Cain offered rationally and simply.   
  
Ambrose just wished that such a platitude of perfect sense hadn’t come from Cain. “I guess so,” he muttered.  
  
“So I’ll tell Mom that Richard was a no-go?”  
  
“No, I’m seeing him again,” Ambrose admitted as he hid behind the folding screen and changed for the night, draping his clothes over it as he sighed considerately. “This time, we’re trying horseback riding in the hopes I’ll find something he’s not exactly perfect at. Maybe…maybe if there’s some flaw…” He trailed off, not wanting to say it aloud.  _Maybe if there’s some flaw, I’ll stop feeling like such a complete mistake and screw-up of a human-being beside him._  He wandered out from the screen and forcibly nudged Cain off the bed so he could crawl in under the covers. “Tell her she has impeccable taste,” Ambrose encouraged.  
  
“You know, the more you settle and become happy, the more she becomes obsessed with putting  _my_  life on track,” Cain said warningly.  
  
Ambrose just turned over so Cain wouldn’t see his smirk. “Well, Cain, you had to get that obsessive need to do right by everyone somewhere.”  
  
“At least they also gave me my pretty, pretty looks,” Cain said sarcastically as he left the bedroom and closed the door quietly behind him. The room, after all, was hushed because Ambrose had turned his face into the pillow to stifle his guffaw of sudden laughter.  
  
*  
  
“So?”  
  
Ambrose was storming back to the house in a rainstorm, having been out there with Richard all day for the ride. Cain was waiting on the porch with Jeb flanking him and Ambrose didn’t even hesitate as he pushed past them, muttering, “He’s not perfect.” He didn’t even care that he was dripping on the floor or that Cain and Jeb were trailing behind him like silent shadows. He flung wet outerwear wherever he could, wincing heavily.  
  
“Ambrose?” Cain asked heavily.  
  
“He  _left_  me. Cut me off in the path of our riding because I didn’t agree to go back to his place and he left me on the ground!” Ambrose shouted through the house as thunder crashed all around. In the brightened light, Cain could see a purple mark on his cheek and disappeared into the kitchen while Jeb started picking up the dripping clothes after him.   
  
“Guess not all of us in the Cain family are so great, huh,” Jeb commented quietly.   
  
Cain returned quickly with a bag of ice, wrapping it within a cloth and striding right up to Ambrose, yanking his chin into the light and pressing the pack there. “Fifteen minutes on,” he warned. “Then I’ll get out the water heater and dip a cloth in that.” He took a quick look at Jeb and nodded for him to leave them. Jeb obliged with a curt nod and Ambrose ignored all of it to sulk into a chair, shoving the ice-pack to his bruised cheek. “You really fell, right? Richard didn’t…”  
  
“No,” Ambrose cut him off with a sigh. “Just a jerk, not an abusive one. When I said I didn’t want him to be perfect, I meant something like him having garlic breath or talking too much, not…this.” He gave a weary groan as Cain sank down onto the armrest beside him and started fixing the icepack. “You know, Cain,” Ambrose bitterly got out, “I can do this myself, I am an adult.”  
  
“Accept the help for once,” Cain snapped right back at him, but he pried his hands away.   
  
“Where are your parents? DG?”  
  
“They took Ella into town to get her new shoes,” Cain explained, eyes not straying from the wound on Ambrose’s face. “They’ll be back in time for dinner, but I’m cooking tonight.” He seemed to anticipate that Ambrose was about to say something, but that was never said because Cain just kept pushing forward. “I think you’re going about this all wrong. I know you didn’t ask, but there it is. If you’re so determined to date, pick someone you know, not a stranger.”  
  
Ambrose sulked in silence and the only sound when Cain ceased to speak was the drip-drop of water on the floor.  
  
“I mean, there’s Raw, there’s Az, and I’m sure they’d each give you a shot.”  
  
“Because I’m such a charity case,” Ambrose muttered.  
  
“And there is me. If you’re so determined to date your way through the whole Cain family, you’re bound to get there someday,” Cain said quietly. “I’m not asking you to marry me, Ambrose. Hell, I’m not even asking for your exclusivity. I just think you could do worse than eating dinner with me without my parents telling me I need more greens and that I ought to consider taking the royal courier job.”  
  
“You really should consider it,” Ambrose supplied helpfully. “It’s great pay.”  
  
“ _Not_  the point.”  
  
“Right.”  
  
“It’s just an offer,” Cain calmly said, pushing to his feet and giving a bow of his head. “I should get back to dinner before Dad gets home and starts thinking he needs to do it for me.”  
  
“Cain?”  
  
“What?”  
  
“Tell me something about your family,” Ambrose said impulsively. They were supposed to talk about it. “Not your parents.  _Your_ family, you and Adora and Jeb,” he specified. If he was going to be true to his promise to talk more, this would have to be a start. The sound of vegetables being chopped made Ambrose think that Cain was ignoring him and was about to say something about how he didn’t have to answer if he didn’t want.  
  
But then, Cain had to go and surprise him. “Adora and I…we…” he sighed, the sound of silence pressing in before knife-on-wood picked up again. “We were supposed to have a daughter, after Jeb.”  
  
Ambrose froze where he was, struck by the information that he hadn’t counted on hearing. “W-what?”  
  
“She miscarried,” Cain quietly said. “And then after that, it would’ve been too cruel to bring a child into the O.Z., what with the Sorceress taking power. I don’t think either of us really got over that.”  
  
“Cain,” Ambrose murmured, eyes wide with panic and fear and guilt. How could he have pried the story from Cain when he had no right to? “Gods, I’m so sorry…”  
  
“So there’s something about my family.” He turned, gesturing to Ambrose with the knife, a dour look on his face. “I know you’re jealous of us or something, but we’re only as close as we are because we know about loss. I lost my sister and I turned back to my parents and Adora and I lost our daughter and that made me hold to Jeb tighter than before,” he said, words sharp. “Whatever happiness you see is forged from loss. Everything comes with a price. But it’s better than giving up and letting the grief devour you whole.”  
  
Ambrose didn’t know what he could possibly say and Cain wasn’t saying anything more, leaving the both of them to be swallowed in thick tension.  
  
“Dad?” Jeb’s voice interrupted from down the hall. “You seen my scarf?”  
  
“Front hall, Jeb.”  
  
The interjection did wonders to break the moment and Ambrose closed his eyes tersely. “I should…get ready for dinner. Dried off, at least,” he laughed nervously. Cain didn’t respond and Ambrose groaned, pushing himself to his feet, the floor creaking under his weight. There was more dripping to be had and he pressed the ice pack harder to his cheek.  
  
“Ambrose?”  
  
“Hm?”  
  
“How about tomorrow?” Cain asked.   
  
“What’s tomorrow?” Jeb whispered to Ambrose, passing him in the hall with red scarf in hand. ‘Nothing!’ Ambrose hissed back at him, still staring in perplexed fear towards the kitchen while Jeb knotted the scarf around his neck and moved to accompany his father. “Dad? What’s going on tomorrow?”  
  
“Tomorrow, Ambrose?” he reiterated, ignoring Jeb’s question.   
  
Ambrose found himself overcome with what could only best be described as sheer and utter panic, not knowing what he was supposed to say in the face of what Cain had offered him and all he could muster was a quiet squeak while Jeb was staring at him as if fish had somehow crawled into his ears and sat there, flopping around comically. What was Cain doing? More importantly, what was  _he_  doing even making squeaking noises towards the affirmative.   
  
“Good, we’ll say six,” Cain went on, sampling some of the sauce he had on the stove. “You should clean up before dinner so my parents don’t start asking questions.”  
  
“You can probably borrow some of DG’s makeup for the uh…” Jeb mustered, gesturing to the bruised area. “She won’t mind.”  
  
“I think I might,” Ambrose mumbled to himself, but used that as his escape from the room and nearly dashed for a bastion of safety where there wasn’t a single Cain or Cain-adoptee to stare at him like he’d gone mad.   
  
Before he could even make sense of the plan or remember that he was still blacking out (the other day had brought about a 24-hour fit, which Ella had endured with him), Ambrose took to shoving all his clothes back into his bag and yanking just about every other item he had procured during his time at the Cain house. He had to get  _out_  and he had to go immediately, before tomorrow could roll around.  
  
He regretted not being around to say goodbye, he reflected as he was crawling out of the window, but really, he knew it had to be then or never. And he would rather have regrets than ruination and he could see the way it would go now.   
  
He was scared. And he was running.  
  
**  
  
Ambrose had been wandering the wilderness for three days before he realized that maybe, just maybe, he had been too hasty in his decision to run off. He also should have brought a map. It was a combination of regret and being lost that brought him back to Harry and Sue’s house three days after he’d run, standing on the stoop with a shamed look on his face and bag in hand.   
  
 _Gods_ , Ambrose prayed to the sky,  _Please don’t let them be armed_. He wasn’t even sure who he’d prefer to open that door. DG was the best bet because any of the other possibilities were just far too fond of guns and swords and enacting revenge in the name of family.   
  
His luck wasn’t with him because it wasn’t DG at the door, but was Harry, instead.   
  
“Oh.”  
  
“Mr. Cain, sir,” Ambrose said dutifully and politely. “Hello.”  
  
“Sue, he’s back,” Harry called over his shoulder without much feeling in his voice. He disappeared from the doorway, but Ambrose knew better than to follow him without an invitation. He swallowed with some difficulty as he stared into the house and tried to count using only prime numbers to calm him and when Sue appeared, he plastered on his brightest smile.   
  
She looked him up and down, clearly unimpressed. “Inside, out back, we need to talk,” she said snappily. “And don’t even try fooling me with that gods-damned fake grin of yours. Go.”   
  
Ambrose did his best not to wither under the words and did exactly as she said, ignoring the way Ella was glaring at him or how Jeb was pretending he didn’t even exist. Just about the only warmth he encountered was DG, who waved happily at him, only to whisper something into Jeb’s ear and smack him in the shoulder. It didn’t change Jeb’s prerogative as he didn’t even dare acknowledge Ambrose’s presence there.   
  
Ambrose slipped through the icy atmosphere of the kitchen and found his way to the balcony out back, where Sue was leaning over the railing and studying the park below.   
  
“You pulled a runner,” she pointed out the obvious very mildly.  
  
“I…did, yes.”  
  
“I also heard what Richard did and I apologize for my brother’s progeny,” she added wryly. “We thought he was something of a gentleman and seems we were good and wrong.”  
  
Ambrose cast his gaze to the slats of the wooden deck beneath him, not sure how much of the story that Sue knew. He had the feeling, though, that the pure act of running was probably not earning him any favours, without adding in the fact that he had rejected her son in the process.   
  
“Sue,” Ambrose started, his voice hushed.  
  
“Save it,” she cut him off. “Wyatt’s not here right now, went to deliver a couple of letters to the post in town so you don’t have to worry about dealing with him, but you have to deal with me and Harry and the rest. Not only did you sneak out the window without a goodbye, but you did it for no good reason.”  
  
“I was scared,” Ambrose admitted, his voice barely audible. “And I’m sorry.”  
  
“Apologize to Wyatt,” she said simply. “If he says you can stay, you can stay.”  
  
She didn’t say anything more than that, just gave him a half-hearted hug and left him to his own guilt and thoughts on the balcony. No one joined him out there and Ambrose felt like his punishment for being a coward was only beginning. Even though they cooked a full dinner, he lingered out in the park and ate on his own, keeping an eye on the door for the last member of the Cain family to return home.  
  
Cain didn’t come back until it was nearly midnight and two moons hung suspended in the sky, shining their pale glistening light down onto them.  
  
“Hi,” Ambrose greeted, when Cain couldn’t stop staring in his direction. “I’m really here. Not a ghost or anything.” His fingers curled at the table and Trigger shifted underneath him, which didn’t make Ambrose feel any better. Instead, he felt like the lone intruder into a happy home and that he didn’t belong. “Your mother said…”  
  
“Ambrose, shut up,” Cain snapped tersely, setting brown-wrapped bundles down on the chair in the front hall. “Let’s just go over this quickly. I asked you to dinner,  _dinner_. Not sex, not the rest of our lives. Dinner. You ran. Not only did you run away from me, but my family and people who’ve grown to care about you.”  
  
The guilt was only increasing tenfold as Cain kept speaking and Ambrose had the feeling he could possibly shrivel up and die of it at any moment.  
  
“So you ran and I’m pissed off, but more than that, I’m disappointed. Ambrose, you’re not well,” he scolded, striding into the kitchen and standing above him, arms crossed and looming. “Who knows where you could have ended up?”  
  
“I’m sorry,” Ambrose swore, filling both the words with such passion and pleading that it felt like they burned on the way out, cut him up with how much he meant them. “I  _am_. Your mother says it’s up to you if I can stay.”  
  
Cain seemed to deliberate that for a long while and no answer came.  
  
“Cain?” Ambrose prodded warily.  
  
“Stay. Just don’t talk to me for a couple of days because I’m not really keen on seeing you right now,” he finished and Ambrose’s guilt was soon accompanied by true and genuine shock at what Cain had to say about him.   
  
So Ambrose blinked rapidly and tried to process that, nodding quickly. “O-okay, sure, yeah.”  
  
“And I wouldn’t expect warm receptions from my parents or Ella anytime soon.”  
  
Ambrose didn’t even need to have eyes to see that. After all, he could tell by how absolutely icy they were acting that it would be an uphill battle to win back both their respect and (if they had even given it to him in the first place) their love. He pushed himself up from the chair as if feeling the heavy weight of the daunting days ahead on his chest and he mustered a weary smile.   
  
He went to bed alone that night and had yet to exchange any words that weren’t cool or angry.   
  
The next morning though was shrouded in something thick and confusing and try as Ambrose might to fight his way through it, he couldn’t find an exit and spent the day with eyes closed, body limp.   
  
One day passed.  
  
Two days passed.  
  
He was somehow conscious of the fact that he was asleep (or unconscious, however you wanted to put it) and as three days passed, he had the feeling that people might be starting to worry. It wasn’t  _like_  all the other times, though, because his brain was just fuzzily out of sight. He knew what was happening and he was still trying to fight his way out of it.   
  
It was something ethereal and impossible that drew him out.  
  
It was Ella.  
  
She was sat somewhere nearby because Ambrose could hear her steady voice all around, as if amplified with speakers. She was constant and she was sure and she was reciting the Newtonian principles of physics to him, then applying them to real life examples. If it was possible, in the thick of Ambrose’s deep sleep, he might have even smiled.  
  
And on the fourth day, he pried his eyes open to find not Ella, but DG and Cain sitting with him. “Raw’s missing,” Ambrose murmured, feeling a bit strange to be speaking after so long with his lips shut. “But I suppose two for three is good…”  
  
“Shut up, Glitch,” DG said warmly and fondly, crawling over the bed to hug him tightly and press her forehead to his. “Harry and Sue won’t be so icy to you. Ella says she still might accidentally lose your things, but I talked them down for the most part.  _All_  of them,” she said pointedly, with a look right in Cain’s direction.   
  
Ambrose wearily hugged DG back tightly, a hand stroking through her hair. “He wasn’t the one who made a mistake.”  
  
“Yeah, but you’re the one smart enough to fix those. He’s just stubborn.”  
  
“ _He_  is still in the room with you two.”  
  
They didn’t seem to acknowledge Cain past that as DG whispered things to Ambrose and promised him that it would turn out fine, that they would work on fixing the blackouts and that he got to stay as long as he wanted, since Harry and Sue had ceded to her argument that Ambrose needed a steady and safe place to heal and their home was better than any other current option.  
  
“Play fair, guys,” DG warned as she left, closing the door behind them to leave Cain and Ambrose alone.   
  
It was awkward for a very long moment and eventually, Cain made the first move. He reached over the bed (and Ambrose didn’t flinch, gods, but it was close) and took Ambrose’s hand into his own, where the ink had washed away weeks and weeks ago, but Ambrose recalled  _exactly_  how the coordinates had looked, written there.  
  
“I gave you those coordinates, the ones on your hand,” Cain said, as if reading Ambrose’s mind. “I gave them to you, you wrote them down, and I told you that if you ever needed a place to get away, you should go there.” He let out a long sigh and released Ambrose’s hand. “I thought you might use some sense and not just  _run away_.”  
  
Ambrose started to twist up the hand and stared at it, no answers to be found there.  
  
“I don’t think I’m going to run away again,” Ambrose said after giving it a good, long consideration. “I don’t  _think_  I will, at least.” He couldn’t say for sure, though, and that might have been irritating him more than anything else. He smoothed a thumb over the back of his palm and glanced hesitantly to Cain. “Is that offer for dinner still on the table? I mean, provided you won’t spend the whole night glaring at me like you want my head to explode, of course.”  
  
“One dinner at the inn,” Cain negotiated with a heavy sigh. “Maybe we’ll see if I can stand looking at you knowing you rejected me.”  
  
Ambrose thought about making a joke, since they seemed to be on the cusp of that, of teasing and genial pokes, but instead, he sobered. “I got scared. And I can’t promise that it won’t happen again because…well, because…” he gave an anxious little laugh, staring up at Cain. “If we do this and it doesn’t work, then is that it? Are we done being friends because I don’t even want to bother trying if that’s the case. But on the other hand, what if we never try and my big, vast, incredible, important…”  
  
“I get it.”  
  
“…wonderful brain lives to process it over and over and then regrets not trying?”  
  
“Look, Ambrose,” Cain started awkwardly. “I can’t tell you what to do because this is your call. I’m willing to try. Even if it means we don’t speak to each other if it falls apart, but we ought to at least try.”  
  
Ambrose felt a bit weak in the head. It was all on him now and that meant that it was his decision if it all came crashing down in a heap of failure. He took a deep breath and looked up at Cain with a half-there smile. “Why not,” he agreed (though possibly not with the most enthusiasm such a subject deserved). “I’m pretty sure your mother would have offered you up inevitably.”  
  
Cain gave a quiet laugh at that and brushed one hand over Ambrose’s hair, the warmth of his fingertips pressing lightly (and lovely) against his scalp. “Get some rest, you’ll be the main event at dinner.”  
  
“I can’t wait,” Ambrose retorted sarcastically, even if truthfully he was secretly looking forward to it. At least, just a little.  
  
*  
  
Night rolled around and after a thoroughly engaging dinner of being asked “Where’d you go? Why’d you come back? Did you bring me anything?” and then the questions about “Where are you and Wy going to dine? What are you wearing?” Ambrose felt like he could sleep for days. Even if he had just woken up from doing just that.  
  
Falling into that blissful place of dreams would have to be delayed, though, because Ambrose’s room was suddenly intruded upon by Cain himself decked in pajamas and clutching a pillow.  
  
“Again?” Ambrose wearily muttered, burying his face into the pillow as he listened to Cain getting himself comfortable in the nearby chair.  
  
Cain just grunted his response and settled with a  _thump_.  
  
“Oh, to be young again,” Ambrose sighed wistfully. “If we ever get to that stage, Cain…”  
  
“I  _don’t_  have that kind of endurance.”  
  
“And I’m not as flexible as I used to be.”  
  
They settled into the covers (trying actively to make as much noise as possible) and Ambrose turned to face away from Cain as he couldn’t help the smallest of smiles on his face. Maybe he hadn’t reached a grand breakthrough yet on how he was going to live his life, but if this was the way he would get to live until he found out, he really couldn’t help enjoying that fact.  
  
“Night, Cain.”  
  
“Get some sleep, Ambrose.”  
  
“Yes,  _sir_.”  
  
And Ambrose could swear that he saw Cain smiling too, even through all that gruff-tough-stoic-Tin Man exterior of his.  
  
**  
  
 _Two Annuals Later_  
  
The telegram had asked him to be in the little town of Andress by Friday, but Ambrose had left early because he was getting tired of Ella constantly demanding to know if he was going to bring her back souvenirs to go with her diploma and oh, did he see her diploma and didn’t it match her graduation gown so nicely, and oh Ambrose, did you see my average? He always had to bite his tongue to avoid pointing out that it was his tutoring that had earned her those grades.  
  
So instead of being there on Friday evening, he was there on Thursday morning and checking into the local inn, hanging around the counter until Cain returned from his delivery. His bag sat by the rustic pine chairs and Ambrose contented himself in asking questions about the local scenery.  
  
“…with apples as big as your head. Really?” he asked, full of skepticism.   
  
“That’s the lore, sir,” the front desk man sighed.  
  
He might have been frustrated with Ambrose given that he had been asking questions constantly for the last five minutes and the apple one had come up three times now. He might have just been bored, but didn’t want to leave seeing as Cain was due back at any moment.  
  
“Apples as big as your head, yes,” a new voice interrupted and drew Ambrose’s attention. He turned to find a blonde woman smiling at him from the mailboxes in the lobby, wandering closer with letters in her hand. “I’ve lived here since I was a teen and I can promise you, sometimes they’re even as big as a horse’s head. No lie.” There were little laugh lines around her blue eyes and they were crinkled with amusement currently as she looked Ambrose over. “I’m Lucy,” she greeted warmly. “Welcome to Andress.”  
  
“Ambrose,” he introduced himself in turn. “I shouldn’t be here long, I’m just visiting a…” He and Cain had gone over this. They were exclusive, but they weren’t  _serious_  exactly. They dated occasionally and visited each other, but never talked about anything more than maybe taking the next step into seeing each other more often. For all of Jeb and DG’s poking and prodding, they were taking it at their own pace, which meant slow and steady. “Well, I guess a friend. A very good friend.” A friend Ambrose occasionally slept with.   
  
Lucy just stared at him and then laughed. “You sure he’s a friend? You sound awful confused about it.”  
  
“We’re awfully confusing together,” Ambrose easily replied. “Why shouldn’t our relationship be anything different?”  
  
She just smiled warmly at him, leaning over to shake his hand while the front door chimed to alert another guest arriving. “Hey, sweetheart, you’re here ear…ly,” Cain started warmly, but trailed off and finished the sentence like he’d just had ice water splashed all over him.   
  
Ambrose glanced over his shoulder to see Cain entering the lobby with the courier badge pinned to his coat, looking as pale as he possibly could, like he’d just seen a ghost.  
  
“Lucy?” Cain exhaled.  
  
Now Ambrose was stuck in the middle of a play where he didn’t know any of the lines. “Uh…Wyatt?”  
  
Lucy just smiled pleasantly, looking between the both of them. “I’m sorry, do I know you?” she asked, sweetly. Cain just staggered forward and before Ambrose could ask more questions or she could stop him, he was hugging her so tightly that there wasn’t an inch of space between them and he pressed a kiss to her head, breathing her name once more against the strands of golden hair. She tensed, shied away, and then glared at Cain with a look that could kill. “Who are you?” she demanded.  
  
“Lucy,” he pleaded. “It’s me. It’s Wyatt,” he said. Ambrose recognized that tone. It was the ‘do or die trying’ one. And he still had no idea what was happening before him. Was she an old ex? From before Adora or maybe after? He would get his answer soon enough, it seemed, because Cain turned around to catch sight of Ambrose, to look Lucy in the eye once more, to press yet another kiss to her hair (even if she flinched, still). “Ambrose, this is Lucy Cain.”  
  
“How did you know that name?” she asked anxiously.  
  
“Because you’re my  _sister_ ,” Cain exhaled, easing back and looking her right in the eye. “Do you remember me, at all?”   
  
She shook her head slowly in the negative and Ambrose felt like something cold was pinning and pricking his heart. He knew that all too well and felt like he had to step in, say something along the lines of that being  _okay_. This was the infamous sister thought dead for so many annuals and there she was, standing and breathing and  _beautiful_.  
  
“Lucy,” Ambrose exhaled. “Maybe we can get those memories back for you. Wyatt’s missed you a lot. Never shuts up about you.”  
  
“Sorry I don’t know better,” she said, slightly skittish. “It’s just that they found me wandering the roads, not remembering who or where I was from. Only reason they knew I’m named Lucy Cain is because I had a necklace, I had…” Her fingers pried past the collar of her shirt and dug out a gold chain with her name on it. “I don’t know where I got it from,” she said apologetically to Cain.  
  
“Mom,” he answered lightly, even if his eyes betrayed how much emotion was brewing beneath the surface. “Mom gave it to you when you turned twelve because you’d been asking for months.”   
  
Cain couldn’t stop looking her over, but Ambrose was the one who took the step towards her.   
  
“There’s a home out there,” Ambrose said quietly. “And maybe you don’t remember right now, but I bet you’d start to remember if you went there. They love you. Wyatt loves you. I’m not saying it has to be fast, not quick, not too much, but you should come home.”  
  
After all, everyone needed a home where their family loved them just for who they were and maybe it had taken Ambrose a long time to get there, but he’d realized that the Cain home was his, too. That they loved him for who he was.   
  
“Come home,” Ambrose encouraged gently. “You can find yourself, there.”  
  
She was still staring at them like she was lost and maybe she was, Ambrose figured. Lost without memories was bad enough, but thinking you were all alone was even worse.   
  
He had offered all he could and just watched that moment prolong – that awkward, painful, silent moment in which Lucy was deep in thought and Cain was hovering over the edge of anticipation and no matter the answer, Ambrose knew something was going to change right there and then, that their lives would never be the same.  
  
Lucy looked up from her deep state of thought.  
  
And the whole world shifted just to the right.  
  
THE END

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Lost and Found](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3849892) by [Dr_Fumbles_McStupid](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dr_Fumbles_McStupid/pseuds/Dr_Fumbles_McStupid)




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